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Forum:Another Stirling Wiki
So a new S.M. Stirling wiki came into being last year. It's still in its beginning stages. But, TF, since you and I both read the LoC works, if we got bored, we might want to lend a hand. Maybe link where appropriate, the HT Draka story, for example. TR 07:24, August 15, 2010 (UTC) :Yeah, we could do that; I would enjoy the chance to do something with LoC. I remember the other Stirling wiki, they seemed to want only literary information and not in-universe articles, so I let them be. Wonder what ever happened to them? Turtle Fan 19:44, August 15, 2010 (UTC) ::For giggles, I went in to the "new" one yesterday and linked up a bunch of categories. I did this without introducing myself, mostly in an attempt to gauge just how active the place might be. My actions have elicited no response at this point. TR 18:56, August 23, 2010 (UTC) :::If the place is more or less abandoned I'm not going to go out of my way to help them, and I'd suggest you not, either. We'd end up running it, at least until we exhausted LoC; that's all the Stirling I've read aside from a couple of forgettable shorts in some anthologies. There is something to be said for the idea that all the major contemporary AH writers' wikis would have the same staff, but we get backlogged enough just trying to run this place. I don't know Flint too well but whenever I'm over there I see a good amount of red there as well, so I assume the situation is similar. ::::Agreed at this point. While part of me likes the idea of an act of "imperial agression" with us rushing over there and running the place, I just am not grounded enough in the man's work. FLint's stuff I've read, and Flint is very good about making stuff available on-line. Stirling, not so much. TR 23:17, August 23, 2010 (UTC) :::::Even if I did know Stirling's stuff enough I wouldn't be too keen on the idea. Too much work; as I said, the work that needs doing around here already exceeds the time, effort, and inclination I can spare for it. :::::Also, if there is a semi-regular administration team, and it's not just the orphan of someone who started it and completely forgot all about it, I could understand how they might resent us doing that. We sort of forced Redem and Baiter out of this Wiki, but they weren't in charge; Silver was, and he invited us. In fact, the fact that he put out a public appeal for people to come "improve" the wiki, complete with a bribe, suggests to me he was hoping someone would come do what we did. Perhaps so he could phase himself out, like you wanted to do with Flint. Turtle Fan 01:27, August 24, 2010 (UTC) :::A Birmo Wiki would be fun, though; we'd get to write about some interesting historical figures. AoT included the usual suspects (Hitler, Himmler, Goering, FDR, Churchill, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Skorzeny) but also John Curtin, Raymond Spruance, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Fulgencio Batista. And that's before you get into the historical figures the Up-Timers introduced: Prince Harry (whom we could have ourselves if we wanted him badly enough), Britney Spears, Frank Sinatra again, Matt Groening, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and of course Hillary Clinton. Then in Without Warning we got posthumous mentions of Bush and Cheney and a number of others. Live appearances by Saddam Hussein, Ariel Sharon, Nicolas Sarkozy, Hugo Chavez, Linda Lingle, Bill Gates. . . . I'm interested in reading After America but I think I'll wait till someone gives me a gift card rather than spend my own money on it. Turtle Fan 19:41, August 23, 2010 (UTC) ::::I'm surprised that hasn't been established yet. Birmo seems to have a solid internet following. TR 23:17, August 23, 2010 (UTC) :::::Actually, I don't know for a fact that there isn't one. I've never stumbled upon one, but I've never searched, either. :::::If there is such a place they'd do well to link here, considering how many HT homages are in AoT. (Actually it's probably not too many numerically, but they do stick out.) Actually, doing Allusions in general would be a blast; Birmo lays them on with a shovel. Turtle Fan 01:27, August 24, 2010 (UTC) ::::FYI, just received a thank you for the category work. So there are signs of life. TR 03:14, August 24, 2010 (UTC) :::Hmm. All right, I'll take a look later. Do they seem to want in-universe articles? I'd like to do LoC articles--As I read both books I thought Hmm, this would lend itself to a Wiki pretty well. And since there's no Evidence! we'll be getting any sequels set in the worlds that lie through those interdimensional gates--which I have to say is a real cocktease--I guess this is the only real option for revisiting that universe. Turtle Fan 04:00, August 24, 2010 (UTC) ::::By and large they seem to prefer in universe. TR 04:05, August 24, 2010 (UTC) :::::I thought so. Most wikia that focus on fiction projects seem to prefer that. In fact the other Stirling wiki was the only exception I've ever seen, not counting a few projects that never appear to have gone anywhere, that have so little content you can't deduce a pattern at all. Turtle Fan 04:22, August 24, 2010 (UTC) I've made my first contribution. They don't have shit on LoC. I wonder if that's their version of Darkness or Elabon. I know how grateful we'd be if we got a couple of people who were hot to trot with that series, hopefully they'll feel the same way when they realize what we're about. Turtle Fan 16:00, August 24, 2010 (UTC) :Looks good. TR 17:12, August 24, 2010 (UTC) ::Ah, thanks. I'd have to say he was my favorite character of the series; I found him far more interesting than either Teyud or especially Jeremy, and even though I enjoyed TSP more than ItCotCK as a whole, there wasn't really any single character who popped out for me in that book, either. Citations/Footnotes ::I took it easy on things like templates and categories till I get my feet wet. I didn't do citations, either, though I noticed that some of those articles cited specific novels and chapters. That seems like a PIA, though if we did that here we wouldn't have scandals like the one last night with Livia Driver. Turtle Fan 18:06, August 24, 2010 (UTC) :::I've been wondering about citations myself. You're right, going back and doing those would be a PIA. But for articles going forward. It could useful for the "Germans were worse than the Belgians" type of information.TR 22:57, August 24, 2010 (UTC) :::Incidentally, I looked in at ah.com, and there is a fellow there who is writing little speculative bits about 191. He lamented the fact that we don't do footnoting here. Normally, I wouldn't care, but since we've had a recent discussion, I thought I'd add his two cents. TR 19:02, August 25, 2010 (UTC) ::::Same thought process here: wouldn't care if it hadn't come up. We can phase it in slowly, I guess. Though if we've got 5700 articles that use no citations and five new ones that do, those five would look silly. ::::Given that most of our minor articles are written in consultation with Amazon, it would be easy, as we'd have page numbers and everything right there. Should we cite page, chapter, or just book? :::::I think more specific the better. TR 20:00, August 25, 2010 (UTC) ::::::Maybe not. Page numbers will change between different editions, but chapter numbers will remain constant. Turtle Fan 20:15, August 25, 2010 (UTC) ::::Oh, and are these speculative bits of his any good? Turtle Fan 19:53, August 25, 2010 (UTC) :::::Many are. He does attempt fix some of the inconsistencies, for example. He focuses left unsaid between HFR and IatD, which I find more interesting than the post-Iatd Cold War between the US and Germany schtick. TR 20:00, August 25, 2010 (UTC) ::::::I've always thought that way lies a much more promising avenue for continuation. And I'm glad our work here is useful in his research, even if it is imperfectly so. Turtle Fan 20:15, August 25, 2010 (UTC) Another pro of footnotes: we can use them instead of, or in addition to, literary comments. TR 17:29, September 20, 2010 (UTC) Article link Ah, fuck, I can't figure it out. Here. They don't anything on the Domination of the Draka, which is surprising, since that's really the first thing I think of when I think of Stirling, even though I've actually read LoC. TR 17:12, August 24, 2010 (UTC) :That is surprising. Draka is kind of his TL-191. LoC is something of an atypical niche project for him, roughly comparable to some of HT's shorter sci-fi and fantasy stories. Like The Scepter of Mercy, kind of. Turtle Fan 18:06, August 24, 2010 (UTC) By the way, are you sure your greeting from an admin was as it appeared? I got one of those automatic form letters with an admin inserted randomly as soon as I finished Sajir. Some Wikia send out a little note automatically whenever a noob makes his first edit. Ours used to do that but we shut it down because most of our noobs at that point were saying things like "Bullshit! Earl Warren wasn't President and he didn't nuke any aliens!" and we wound up banning them even as our signatures were appearing on thank-you notes for their valuable contributions. Turtle Fan 18:06, August 24, 2010 (UTC) :I got one of the automated ones, too, but this was a specific "Thanks for the categories, it's drudge work" or something like that. TR 19:13, August 24, 2010 (UTC) I'm playing around a little more, writing some very short articles that are relevant to Sajir. I have to say, this is a lot of fun. Turtle Fan 22:06, August 24, 2010 (UTC) Historical Characters They've only got a handful of articles on historical figures and most of those say nothing more than "This is information on Johnny Jackass in Stirling's work. For information on the historical figure, see this Wikipedia page." I gave them two, in our style, that had had me thinking as I read the books "I wish I were doing a Wiki on these so I could write articles." One on Elizabeth I (which I guess we could cross-link to ours if it comes to that) for Sajir saying he was born the year of her coronation; and one on Bob Dole for being President when the US and Friends established their Venusian base. The EastBloc told them they had to share information and resources because the commies had been there first. Dole told them to stick it and they stuck it. I wish we had a Bob Dole article of our own. If we did, we'd be able to make a Senate Majority Leaders category. (We'd do better to call it a Senate Party Leaders category, but it would be equally viable either way: Dole, LBJ and Robert Taft, and all three were both Majority and Minority Leaders.) Anyway, I didn't add templates or even pictures, but I followed our SOPs to the letter. I guess we could use it as something of a lightning rod to see how open they are to collaboration: If they're going to have a problem with us going in and doing things our way, this should get us some protests. Of course I didn't go in with the intention of being provocative. Honest! Turtle Fan 23:40, August 24, 2010 (UTC) Oh, and there's no Birmingham wiki, at least not one that Google can find. I thought I had one for a minute but it turns out it's a wiki of all things Birmingham, Alabama. Turtle Fan 23:41, August 24, 2010 (UTC) Jim in Georgia He seems nice. Turtle Fan 03:10, August 25, 2010 (UTC) He does. After playing around in the Emberverse stuff, I became curious. I popped over to the library on the way home, and they have the complete series thus far, as well as the Nantuckett books (no LoC, though, worse luck). I took it as a sign, and checked out the first volume. So, yeah, I may have yet one more wiki I play around on. TR 03:38, August 25, 2010 (UTC) I've been keeping an eye out for things they do there which could be of use to us here. We've already spitballed the citations. I was also thinking of that Referenced Characters category. We must have a million people, fictional and historical both, who get into a story's character category based on nothing stronger than "Such-and-such reminded Sam Yeager of something he'd once heard about Joe Blow." We've discussed seeking to correct that in the past. This might be a good model to use. Turtle Fan 04:31, August 25, 2010 (UTC) :Probably. We might want to be more specific, however, given the overlap in historical figures in HT projects. For exampe, Stalin is referenced in 191 and TWTPE, but appears in WW. I may be overthinking this, of course. :I was also looking at the templates they use there. Generally, I don't think they'd serve our purposes, but I do like the bar across the screen with the title of the story above the text. We'd probably cut our hit and runners down to nothing if we had that. However, I'm really not high on redoing templates yet again, and that would require some creative templating for the historicals. TR 14:47, August 25, 2010 (UTC)